James Webb Space Telescope - First images coming tomorrow

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 7/27/2022 at 11:10 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

* Looks for people pronouncing it "astro-fizzi-kist" * 

* points and laffs *

Yeah well. That is what high frequency hearing loss can do for you.

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 7/28/2022 at 9:40 AM, Madelaine McMasters said:

I hope you're not looking for spoilers.

My lips are sealed.

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 7/28/2022 at 10:22 AM, Katherine Heartsong said:

I have always loved Turok's simple explanation of two infinitely almost perfectly flat, quantum vibrating sheets of a universe separated by mere quantum inches (aside: that appears curved to use due to the nature of gravity, space ,and time) on which energy just expands out across over a few trillion years.

At some point there is so little energy near to each other across these vast sheets that the vibrations of the two sheets suddenly touch again, bringing all the energy of each sheet onto that one point causing a new big bang and the cycle to start all over again.

I read that as Tuvok. Silly me.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

Just hear the Webb telescope shifted and was aiming at Abnor Mole's house.  They found a big pile of legs! He has been selling them to keep the SL population "legged!" 

I believe, the entire escapade is currently only.. alleged.

[Katherine Heartsong]

59 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I read that as Tuvok. Silly me.

This seems logical to me.

[Silent Mistwalker]

6 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

This seems logical to me.

Thanks for the laughs and the fish. They just slammed the lid on 99% of the (worthwhile) discussions and on 100% of the fun. 

Silent will be silent on the forums from now on. Let the celebration begin! 🥳

 

Happy Friday! 👎

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

I wonder if the telescope's pictures are in the open domain --- like meaning anyone could use them? Some would make wonderful images for your in world picture frames.

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

I wonder if the telescope's pictures are in the open domain --- like meaning anyone could use them? Some would make wonderful images for your in world picture frames.

You paid taxes for it, they better be open to the public.. hehehehe

[Love Zhaoying]

Are people making (and selling, I guess) Second Life EEP's from the images yet?

[Ceka Cianci]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Are people making (and selling, I guess) Second Life EEP's from the images yet?

That would be awesome to have those in the sky..

I'm gonna look into how to make them there EEP's..

[Anaiya Ahren]

Quote

I wonder if the telescope's pictures are in the open domain --- like meaning anyone could use them?

https://gpm.nasa.gov/image-use-policy

[Brightstar7777]

Quote

To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old.  Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”

Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually say. The truth that these papers don’t report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”

--aia.tv article "The Big Bang Didn't Happen."

 

[Luna Bliss]

34 minutes ago, Brightstar7777 said:

 

That is very cool. I never believed the Big Bang was right. I mean how could the Universe be linear?

[Qie Niangao]

Well, I wouldn't get too dismissive of the Big Bang on the basis of a guy with an old book to sell. That Eric Lerner quote has been embedded in a slightly more measured text:

Quote

Now, Lerner is the author of a book called The Big Bang Never Happened (1992) but — while that makes him an interested party — it doesn’t make him wrong. 

That quoting text is making the rounds of scientific clickbait, but I think it was the mindmatters.ai link that Google News thought I should read.

All that said, it's amazing how much confirmation there seems to be for such a tame extrapolation as the Big Bang theory: Everything instantly emerges from nothing, already behaving—so parsimoniously—by the same laws as it does now. Just the one instantaneous discontinuity? Suspiciously tidy, seems to me, yet apparently consistent with observations.

[Maryanne Solo]

I've had some smarty pants tutors at my day job being a bit narky lately because of some idjit
middle managers carelessness....
Rather than rip them a new black hole...😜 and me get huffy and really ginger about things,
I just say politely "well lets see if we can get the JWT to focus on the issue for you then".
They usually have to ask someone else what I mean lol.
duuuh. 🙄 

[Brightstar7777]

19 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

All that said, it's amazing how much confirmation there seems to be for such a tame extrapolation as the Big Bang theory: Everything instantly emerges from nothing, already behaving—so parsimoniously—by the same laws as it does now. Just the one instantaneous discontinuity? Suspiciously tidy, seems to me, yet apparently consistent with observations.

I think that it depends upon how you connect the dots.

You could draw anything using the dots, especially if you just ignore the dots that don't at first make sense to you, but the job that astronomers and cosmologists and astrophysicists and so forth have set out to do is determine the truth of what's going on based on all the evidence. 

Personally, I'm happy to see this new evidence because I'm really hopeful that new physics and new observations are going to lead us to some exciting new frames of view. It's come a long way. And we've been given explanations of how it's expanded, but not why. 

Quote

In the 18th century, the concept that the age of the Earth was millions, if not billions, of years began to appear. However, most scientists throughout the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th century presumed that the universe itself was Steady State and eternal, possibly with stars coming and going but no changes occurring at the largest scale known at the time.

The first scientific theories indicating that the age of the universe might be finite were the studies of thermodynamics, formalized in the mid-19th century. The concept of entropy dictates that if the universe (or any other closed system) were infinitely old, then everything inside would be at the same temperature, and thus there would be no stars and no life. No scientific explanation for this contradiction was put forth at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe#History

Quote

Einstein’s intended his theory to replace Newton’s theory of gravitation completely. In Einstein’s view, gravity was not a force existing independently of the spatial ‘container’; rather, gravitation arises as a curvature of the space (and time, which is necessarily connected to space in the new theory), which means that geometry and gravity and astronomical behavior are all intimately connected.

For example, near the sun the geometrical structure, the curvature, of spacetime changes radically... One immediate, and to some, puzzling, consequence of Einstein’s theory is that the geometry of the Universe is no longer taken to be Euclidean. Although there are several different candidates for the actual geometry of space, it was not known which is correct.

Obviously, the universe as observed by astronomers did not conform at all to the description provided by either solution, a fact many found troubling. Moreover, no additional solutions were forthcoming (even though both Friedmann and LeMaître had developed alternatives, they remained unknown and unnoticed). For nearly twelve years, the new cosmology appeared to be going nowhere. Then Hubble at California’s Mt. Palomar made public his astonishing observations of a cosmic Doppler shift, a shift toward the red in the color of light coming from the most distant star systems.

Most cosmologists—with the interesting exception of Hubble himself—came to the immediate conclusion that the red shift could only mean that the universe was expanding. Immediately the relativity theorists were able to interpret the expansion as a continuous change in the geometry of spacetime, which was thoroughly accounted for by the General Theory of Relativity. After over a decade of stagnation in face of the meager choice between just two models of the cosmos, Hubble’s observations spurred theorists on to the construction of a melange of new models, each vying in competition with the other.

In the end, it was the Belgian astronomer Georges LeMaître’s theory of an expanding universe that came to be accepted. LeMaître’s model was publicly proclaimed as appropriate and generally correct during a special session of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 31 Oct 1931.

Because it represented such a radical departure from previous scientific thinking about the Universe, relativistic cosmology needed to work out its philosophical underpinnings, most especially in regard to its methodology. ‘How is this new science to be conducted?’ was thus a compelling question. But method, of course, is always linked to metaphysics and epistemology. A full-blown philosophical discussion was evidently required. It came soon enough: within a span of less than a year, a vigorous debate between two philosophically opposed camps developed. The debate required nearly two decades to reach its full resolution. But, with the resolution, cosmology had philosophically certified its methodology within the context of a consensus metaphysics and epistemology. 

(from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-30s/#GreCosDebBeg193193)

I do worry about  "consensus metaphysics" making a field become hidebound, or directing research to reach the wrong conclusions or miss something big hidden in the data. When you get a photo from a telescope with galaxies that are "too old and numerous to exist," you sit up and take notice. I fear there are many many things like this out there.

Quote

Cosmic inflation is a widely accepted theory about what happened during the first fraction of a second during the Big Bang, but it is not proven. The current dispute over the cosmic expansion rate may be a reflection of our ignorance about that early era. Why and how the Big Bang occurred are complete mysteries. You may have heard cosmologists speculate about the “multiverse,” or about the idea of an oscillating universe with many beginnings, or about a collision between two membranes of reality that created our universe. Nobody knows which of these ideas, if any, is correct. But what they all have in common is that they all accept the evidence that our current universe emerged from an intensely hot, dense early state — which is to say, they all take the Big Bang as their starting point.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/could-the-big-bang-be-wrong

Edited August 15, 2022 by Brightstar7777
revisions: retractions and reductions and de-escalated. *sips tea* good morning

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

I was in world the other day and saw a shop selling picture frames with some beautiful images from that telescope.

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Brightstar7777 said:

 

Ha! In a very different discipline, there's recently this: "Math error: A new study overturns 100-year-old understanding of color perception / A paradigm shift away from the 3D mathematical description developed by Schrödinger and others to describe how we see color could yield more vibrant computer displays, TVs, printed materials, textiles and more"

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Ha! In a very different discipline, there's recently this: "Math error: A new study overturns 100-year-old understanding of color perception / A paradigm shift away from the 3D mathematical description developed by Schrödinger and others to describe how we see color could yield more vibrant computer displays, TVs, printed materials, textiles and more"

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Qie!

Quotes of interest:

"That model was suggested by Bernhard Riemann and developed by Hermann von Helmholtz and Erwin Schrödinger — all giants in mathematics and physics — and proving one of them wrong is pretty much the dream of a scientist.” 

I highlighted a concept that is foreign to those who think science is groupthink.

“We might be able to think of it normally but with an added dampening or weighing function that pulls long distances in, making them shorter. But we can’t prove it yet.”

That sure sounds like the logarithmic behavior of our photosensors, though that's so well understood that they must mean something else on top of that.

[Brightstar7777]

 

[Ceka Cianci]

This is getting really interesting.

 

[Ceka Cianci]

Every image so far from The WEBB Telescope so far..

LIVE NEW IMAGES From James Webb Telescope (UP TO DATE - Every Image Until Now)